UofT researchers will present 32 papers at the premiere international robotics conference this year. The 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation will take place from May 30 to June 5, 2021 in a hybrid format based in Xi’an, China, with all plenary sessions to be streamed (more info on that coming soon!). The ICRA 2021 Program Chair is our own Robotics Institute Director, Yu Sun.
UofT papers cover everything from localization, mapping and navigation, robot learning, micro and nano robots, manipulation and grasping, distributed systems, human-robot interaction and more, reflecting the breadth and depth of robotics research that takes place at the UofT Robotics Institute. Accepted papers include (University of Toronto faculty and students in bold):
Autonomy
Jerry Liu, Wenyuan Zeng, Raquel Urtasun, Ersin Yumer, “Deep Structured Reactive Planning”
Isam Al-Darabsah, Mohammad Al Janaideh, Sue Ann Campbell, “The Effect of Input Signals Time-Delay on Stabilizing Traffic with Autonomous Vehicles”
Bob Wei, Mengye Ren, Wenyuan Zeng, Ming Liang, Bin Yang, Raquel Urtasun, “Perceive, Attend, and Drive: Learning Spatial Attention for Safe Self-Driving”
Human-Robot Interaction
Shane Saunderson and Goldie Nejat “Robots Asking for Favors: The Effects of Directness and Familiarity on Persuasive HRI”
Localization and/or Mapping
Anqi Joyce Yang, Can Cui, Ioan Andrei Bârsan, Raquel Urtasun, Shenlong Wang, “Asynchronous Multi-View SLAM”
Rehman Merali and Timothy Barfoot, “MCMC Occupancy Grid Mapping with a Data-Driven Patch Prior”
Keenan Burnett, Angela P. Schoellig, Timothy Barfoot, “Do We Need to Compensate for Motion Distortion and Doppler Effects in Radar-Based Navigation?”
David Juny, Haowei Zhang, Mona Gridseth, Hugues Thomas, Timothy Barfoot, “Unsupervised Learning of Lidar Features for Use in a Probabilistic Trajectory Estimator”
Mollie Bianchi and Timothy Barfoot, “UAV Localization Using Autoencoded Satellite Images”
Wenda Zhao, Jacopo Panerati, Angela P. Schoellig, “Learning-based Bias Correction for Time Difference of Arrival Ultra-wideband Localization of Resource-constrained Mobile Robots”
Jun Yang, Dong Li and Steven Waslander, “Probabilistic Multi-View Fusion of Active Stereo Depth Maps for Robotic Bin-Picking”
Manipulation and Grasping
Xinlei Pan, Animesh Garg, Anima Anandkumar, Yuke Zhu, “Emergent Hand Morphology and Control from Optimizing Robust Grasps of Diverse Objects
Micro and Nano Robots
Cameron Forbrigger, Adam Schonewille, and Eric Diller, “A Miniature Magnetic Robot with Tailored Magnetic Torsion Springs”
Changsheng Dai, Harbin Zhuang, Zhuoran Zhang, Guanqiao Shan, Yu Sun, “Automated End-effector Alignment for Robotic Cell Manipulation”
Mohammad Salehizadeh and Eric Diller, “Path Planning and Tracking for an Underactuated Two-Microrobot System”
Multiple and Distributed Systems
Jacky Liao, Che Liu, and Hugh Liu, “Model Predictive Control for Cooperative Hunting in Obstacle Rich and Dynamic Environments”
Gang Wang, Li Wen-long, Cheng Jiang, Dahu Zhu, He Xie, Xingjian Liu, Han Ding, “Simultaneous Calibration of Multi-coordinates for a Dual-robot System by Solving the AXB=YCZ Problem”
Robot Learning
Yuchen Wu, Melissa Mozifian, Florian Shkurti, “Shaping Rewards for Reinforcement Learning with Imperfect Demonstrations using Generative Models”
Zhaoming Xie, Xingye Da, Michiel van de Panne, Buck Babich, Animesh Garg, “Dynamics Randomization Revisited: A Case Study for Quadrupedal Locomotion”
Yizhou Huang, Kevin Xie, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Florian Shkurti, “Continual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Hypernetworks”
Christopher McKinnon, Angela P. Schoellig, “Meta Learning with Paired Forward and Inverse Models for Efficient Receding Horizon Control”
Homanga Bharadhwaj, Animesh Garg, Florian Shkurti, “LEAF: Latent Exploration Along the Frontier”
Thomas Hugues, Ben Agro, Mona Gridseth, Jian Zhang, Timothy Barfoot, “Self-Supervised Learning of Lidar Segmentation for Autonomous Indoor Navigation”
Roberto Martín-Martín, Arthur Allshire, Charles Lin, Shawn Manuel, Silvio Savarese, Animesh Garg, “LASER: Learning a Latent Action Space for Efficient Reinforcement Learning”
Sensor Fusion
Zhongzhen Luo, Fengjia Zhang, Guoyi Fu, Jiajie Xu, “Self-Guided Instance-Aware Network for Depth Completion and Enhancement”
Soft Robotics
Georg Böttcher, Sven Lilge, Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, “Design of a Reconfigurable Parallel Continuum Robot with Tendon-Actuated Kinematic Chains”
Priyanka Rao, Quentin Peyron, Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, “Using Euler Curves to Model Continuum Robots”
Nan Liang, Reinhard M. Grassmann, Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, “Learning-based Inverse Kinematics from Shape as Input for Concentric Tube Continuum Robots”
Runze Zuo, Zhanfeng Zhou, Binbin Ying, Xinyu Liu, “A Soft Robotic Gripper with Anti-Freezing Ionic Hydrogel-Based Sensors for Learning-Based Object Recognition”
Theoretical Foundations
Emmett Wise, Ivana Perić, Juraj Bartolic, Christopher Grebe, Ivan Petrovic, Jonathan Kelly, “A Continuous-Time Approach for 3D Radar to Camera Extrinsic Calibration”
Vision-based Navigation
Shatil Rahman and Steven Waslander, “Uncertainty Constrained Differential Dynamic Programming in Belief Space for Vision Based Robots”
Justin Tomasi, Brandon Wagstaff, Steven Waslander, Jonathan Kelly, “Learned Camera Gain and Exposure Control for Improved Visual Feature Detection”
Congratulations to everyone!